Discover how to build a trusting team that can transform your business. In this episode, we delve into the importance of trust within a team, why it's crucial for business evolution, and how you can foster it. Learn how to build a trusting team that not only meets but exceeds targets. Get insights into how trust can be the catalyst for change in your business. Don't miss out on this opportunity to build a trusting team and achieve your business goals.
Watch the video version of this podcast at https://youtu.be/v8stwaGpC_Q
Discussion Points:
[00:05:23] The need for business evolution.
[00:08:29] Business owners juggle hats constantly, switching roles.
[00:13:35] Equipping team members for success in business.
[00:14:13] Planning with org chart helps prioritise growth.
[00:17:59] Leverage scorecard system to measure responsibilities.
[00:23:53] Simplify onboarding with a checklist; boost retention with gamification and cash rewards.
[00:27:24] Remote work: trust your team and goals.
[00:29:04] Involving team members increases their buy-in.
[00:32:08] Team leaders shadow to gain responsibility & experience.
[00:34:31] Promoting within ensures experience and understanding.
[00:38:44] Apprenticeship memories, learning outdated business practices.
[00:42:49] Levels in strategic planning, tiers in conversations.
[00:44:41] Performance reviews are important but need process.
[00:48:11] Young team members learn about CPI increase
Resources:
Have a conversation with us! Go to tradie.wiki/pod and book a call.
Check this out:
Connect with me on LinkedIn. For more podcast episodes, you can also visit our website.
Thank you for tuning in!
If you enjoyed this podcast and this series, please take 5 to leave us a review:
Discover how to build a trusting team that can transform your business. In this episode, we delve into the importance of trust within a team, why it's crucial for business evolution, and how you can foster it. Learn how to build a trusting team that not only meets but exceeds targets. Get insights into how trust can be the catalyst for change in your business. Don't miss out on this opportunity to build a trusting team and achieve your business goals.
Watch the video version of this podcast at https://youtu.be/v8stwaGpC_Q
Discussion Points:
[00:05:23] The need for business evolution.
[00:08:29] Business owners juggle hats constantly, switching roles.
[00:13:35] Equipping team members for success in business.
[00:14:13] Planning with org chart helps prioritise growth.
[00:17:59] Leverage scorecard system to measure responsibilities.
[00:23:53] Simplify onboarding with a checklist; boost retention with gamification and cash rewards.
[00:27:24] Remote work: trust your team and goals.
[00:29:04] Involving team members increases their buy-in.
[00:32:08] Team leaders shadow to gain responsibility & experience.
[00:34:31] Promoting within ensures experience and understanding.
[00:38:44] Apprenticeship memories, learning outdated business practices.
[00:42:49] Levels in strategic planning, tiers in conversations.
[00:44:41] Performance reviews are important but need process.
[00:48:11] Young team members learn about CPI increase
Resources:
Have a conversation with us! Go to tradie.wiki/pod and book a call.
Check this out:
Connect with me on LinkedIn. For more podcast episodes, you can also visit our website.
Thank you for tuning in!
If you enjoyed this podcast and this series, please take 5 to leave us a review:
Hey, it's Matt Jones here. If you want to check out the. Video version of this podcast, click on the first link in the description, get. Payment and then we're leading into, are we going to have cash flow problems? And each issue that you face is better than the one that you just overcame, so you just got to keep searching for the next best problem. Sam. Welcome to the siteshed, Podcast. Matty, thank you very much for having me, mate. It's a pleasure to be here. Bit of a fellow podcast yourself. I've seen a couple of clips on. The old IG mate, I haven't committed to creating a podcast myself. I know there's a lot of effort involved in it, but I am serial. Ah, serial pest. What? Yes, one of the two we have that in common. Depends on how well you know me will be whether it's a pest or a guest. We'll let the ratings do the talking, shall we, mate? Welcome aboard. You're from Alpha trady down in Adelaide at the moment. So we're here today to talk about culture, trust, putting responsibility on your team, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. Give us the 30,000 foot view on Alpha Trading and how you got to where you are. Well, mate, before the guys hear the word culture and go, oh, fuck this, I'm out of here, today is not going to be about pumping everybody's tires up and everything of the sort. It's more about you don't have to wear all the responsibility yourself. And we're going to have a bit of a discussion about how you can start to drip feed some of the responsibility that you're wearing into your team so that they can wear some of that responsibility, so that you can then spend time with your family and do the other shit that you want to do. So before we check out, it's not just fucking culture this, culture that. We're going to have a pool table of the office type stuff. This is more about just believing in the guys that you've got around you so that they can can help you build what you're trying to build. No chanting, no, like, no chanting, no kumbaya, no, we save that for the sales calls. Classic. Good. So I know you came from a trade background too, didn't you? Yes, of sorts. I'm not a trades person myself exactly. I started a construction cleaning company about five years ago called Build Clean and had a lot of luck and I suppose fortune along with that as well, to scale from Adelaide to Brisbane, Melbourne, and working our way down the Eastern Seaboard. So at the moment, that company sits just over 100 staff members and fucking way too many vans, that I'd like to admit, but, yeah, it's really taken over, I suppose you could say. Fantastic. Good on you. I'm guessing you've got the full structure in place there so you can go record podcasts and pester people while the work gets done. Absolutely. I reckon it was last Wednesday or the Wednesday before I kind of hung up the ego along with the business card that said CEO, business partner offshore. It was a great milestone and a great line in the sand to say that this is not just me, I'm not intertwined in the company. Build, clean and sam are not the same thing. They're separate entities. And I suppose it kind of bleeds into today as well into the trust of people around you. I don't need to be there with my fucking special title sitting there doing jack shit. So I'm out here trying to inspire others to do the same. Probably more importantly just meddling in other people's business and making it harder for them. It's something of the sort. Probably a little bit harder to get a little bit easier. That's why I'm actively removing myself from my business because I'm pretty sure that I'm the one who just makes shit harder than it needs to be. Yes, number one expense is myself. Awesome. Well, cool, man. Yeah, let's jump in. So what are some of the things that we're going to be talking about today? And I suppose why are they relevant to trade businesses and where do we start with this? Perfect. I think we can almost reverse engineer that question a little and think about for the listeners what you're really trying to achieve in your business. Not just this year and next year, not just getting the big Ram 1500, the new Ute, more about why did we leave working for somebody else, start working for ourselves and what are we actually wanting to get out of it at the end. And once we kind of conceptualize that, usually it's based around freedom or the ability to have adequate investments and financial wealth and legacy and all those kind of elements. But once we get a clear picture on what that is, then we can come back down to a granular level and start to understand and implement different steps in order to reduce the amount of responsibility that we have. To wear so that we can then start to almost duplicate ourself and make more of us in the team so that then our companies can grow and then be sustainable without us. Is Alphatrady a coaching business? It is, yes. We've got some online courses and some coaching programs available, but I'm not here to hard sell today. Oh no, I was just curious. It's funny you say that stuff as well because I literally just came off a podcast recording. Well, I've actually done two this morning already. That's how productive I am. Yeah, right, but anyway and the topic of that podcast was why I burned it to the ground and why you probably should too. And we talk about essentially the evolution of your business and why your business should evolve and why what you're doing today may not very well work tomorrow and you kind of got to have those fresh eyes and whatever. But part of the polarizing, I suppose the thing that really got the needle moving for me in that regard was going back and redoing our vision and mission and our values and understanding similar to what you said then, like where do I want to be? What do I want as a legacy? What are I actually trying to achieve here? Am I happy with what I'm doing at the moment from a work perspective? Am I happy with the outcomes of the customer satisfied, blah, blah, blah, all these kind of things. And it was a big evolution. We really did throw a match to the old model and sort of stuff from the ground up but it was the best thing we ever did. And I just think too many businesses get stuck in the rut and they don't do that enough. Exactly. And I think it's pretty important to know that if it's your first iteration of doing your vision, mission, values or your purpose and that kind of thing, it's okay to know that the target is in that certain direction in that forest. And I'm just going to trech towards that as opposed to going, I can't work out what my one sentence statement is that summarizes my entire life. So as you start to do iterations of that over and over over the five and ten year period, you'll get closer and closer to what that single statement is. But for those who are like, I've never thought about this question what is my purpose in that regard? Then just picture the target over in that direction. And the one thing that I've learned and through various coaches and books I've read and all that sort of stuff over the years is that target is there as like the North Star I suppose, to guide you. But that target will inevitably move. And the reason why it's important to make I suppose this a regular cadence is because it will move and you will have different priorities and things will evolve and things will change and you want to make sure that you're keeping up to speed with that. It doesn't have to be a static thing. Exactly. Not a single statement, a massive one, that changed me and probably changed for you is when your children are born. When your first child is born, prior to that you're going, I'm going to make a hundred million dollar company and I'm going to achieve all of these tangible elements. And then your child comes along and you start to value your time outside of other elements. You value your time at home as well as actually in the company and how can you be more effective with your time at work. And those kind of things really start to change up what you actually wanted to achieve. And I suppose that comes with your natural maturity or progression throughout your life. And business, I think, as well as business owners, it's a constant game of taking one hat off and putting another one on. This quarter you might be the HR person because you need to employ a couple of people and recruit. Right. But then the next quarter you might be the marketing guy because you got to get back in and create marketing schedules and all that kind of stuff and content. And so the hat always changes, which is both, I suppose, exciting and maybe a little bit derailing for people that aren't prepared for it. But that's realistically. Like the evolution of a business owner, there's always an area of your business you probably need to get in there and fix and apply some attention to so that you, like you say, can sort of create some process around it, hand off that responsibility to someone else that can step in and then take it over. Yeah, exactly. I've always thought that the game is to wear the least amount of hats possible. So at the start, every day it's a different one. As you get better and better, or as you get more people around you, someone else can wear one hat and another person wears the other hat and then you just wear the ones that you like. But as you were saying, as soon as you increase your sales, the next problem is going to arise after that. So you finish one problem and another problem starts and so on and so forth. And it's very often the case of and this is what I actually spoke about in the previous podcast, too. If you do burn it to the ground and you start from scratch and you're targeting towards, say, this new outcome for your customers, inevitably it will lead to a bottleneck further down the line somewhere, which you need to kind of look through the crystal ball and foresee so you can resolve that for them. That's not necessarily a bad thing either. It's sometimes an opportunity for you to get back in that space and cross sell upsell, reengage with your clients, get back in the house, like whatever it might be. But the point is, I suppose, understanding what that's potentially going to look like so that you can sort of mitigate anything that's going to happen along the way, which might have a negative impact. Absolutely. It's upgrading your problems. As one problem changes, then you get to the next tougher one. Yeah, absolutely. As soon as you finish that sales pipeline, you're then leading into, how are we going to service the work? How are we going to get payment? And then we're leading into, are we going to have cash flow problems? And each issue that you face is better than the one that you just overcame. So you just got to keep searching for the next best problem. Well, yeah, that's right. And it doesn't take a lot of searching. Absolutely. There's a lot of leaning on your team as well. There's a lot of totally not wearing all the responsibility and all the burden, I suppose you could say yourself. So that's where it comes. I suppose today's topic is putting a bit of trust in the guys around you. And if you don't trust the one, two or ten guys that you've got, then you've really got to consider, how long is this company going to last with you having to wear all the responsibility because it's either going to end in a heart attack or a divorce. Yeah, exactly. Definitely. Let's dive into it because I know getting the right team members on board and getting them in the right positions, that's one of the biggest challenges, I suppose. And then maybe it's like a mental block from the business owner's point of view, where you're so used to doing things for people that you feel like obligated to continue doing it, you know, instead of just saying, no, this is your responsibility and this is what you're in charge of, and just get it done. And there's some huge mental roadblocks limiting beliefs, although I don't really like the term or just general difficulties that I had, and I'm sure everybody else does as well, through some crucial stages of the first being, stepping away from site for any amount of time was a really difficult thing to do. And then once you've stepped away a little bit, then it gets to when you don't actually attend site, which is kind of the next catalyst change, where you stop wearing work boots and you start wearing RMS or whatever your office uniform is, and then you get, oh, you're in Melbourne. I thought you said you're in Adelaide. No, we're 1015 years behind as far as fashion goes, so we're still running RMS and Chinos over here. Classic. We haven't got to the black Doc Martens yet. Okay, nice. But yeah, yeah. So there's a few massive iterations that I suppose you maybe don't want to jump across and the first one's always trying to get off the tools and leave site and not feel guilty for doing that as well. And that's where you start to look at who are the lead guys on the team and can I instill my trust in them? And that starts to free up your time, whether it's only a couple of hours a day to do the bookwork that would have otherwise been done in the evening and start nailing that during the day. So let's talk a little bit about the structure and the framework behind equipping team members with the framework they need in order to be successful within any given role within the business. I have said this a million times on the podcast before, and I've been guilty with it over and over again where you go and hire someone, you don't onboard them properly, you don't equip them properly. They can't do the role that you're imagining they should be able to do, because whatever they're like some unicorn, you end up firing them, blaming them, when the reality is it's been your fault the whole time because you just haven't really given them the right opportunity. Poor planning would go into that, I suppose my frameworks are the frameworks that I've used to overcome that or make it a bit easier. Firstly is developing an.org chart. So understanding just a fancy name for drawing circles on a piece of paper with usually yourself at the top, and then the people that you think or the roles that you think need to be in the company in order for you to succeed. Whether you need to have an estimator, whether you need to have a project manager, whether it's just you four tradesmen and three apprentices, whatever that kind of tree looks like, almost like an octopus looks like from that map in your head. And obviously that's going to change as the company grows. But from that map in your head, you can then start to see who is the most important person that you should be employing next. So whether it's just yourself, then you're adding on a tradesman and you can even start to see some trade offs just by looking at this graph of if the company is not performing very well, if it's not very profitable, you may be better off getting an apprentice because they're cheaper. However, they're going to take more of your time. So you can start to almost draw little hypothetical questions on your chart about who are the right next people to bring in and what's the right process for your company. So, Sam, just to interrupt you, sorry. Would you like when you're teaching people to have obviously a current chart where things are at now, and do you do the forecasted.org chart of what you would like things to look like? Absolutely, yeah. And that future vision, we try to keep it to a few extra people, whether that's in your twelve month plan or your five year plan. I don't want to overwhelm people to think that in 20 years time we're going to have an executive structure, CFOs and that kind of stuff. It's more just like, let's look at the next three to five hires and put those in so that we're not overwhelmed with the massive burden of what we're trying to build, if that's the way guys are going. So yeah, we're definitely looking at what we have now and then what the future picture looks like and trying to fill in the gaps with the least amount of resistance possible. So still maintaining a profit and as you touched on earlier as well, just going out hiring somebody, that's a difficulty in and of itself. And then onboarding and retaining these guys without setting any expectations or without you getting clear on what you want them to do. We're setting up a bit of a recipe for disaster. So I've always envisioned and I've always done the role that I want to hire next. So say, for example, in my team here, we were developing project managers for our build clean company, and I had to wear the project manager role and hat and record what was expected of myself. Are there any metrics, are there any KPIs that I should be recording? A lot of them were quotes sent and quotes accepted, which were really easy to measure, but I was working through to understand, if I am in this stage, you're talking yourself up. You're the best person in your business. So if I'm the best person at this project manager role, then this is what I expect from that person. Wear that hat for a few months, understand exactly what's involved, and then you're getting to the point where you've got a little bit of documentation, whether it's just a scribble on a piece of paper or whether it's some beautiful document in Word or however you're producing it, but having some set of expectations. That's not just the bullshit job description that says, I work well in a team, and here's my fake resume that I've made up when I was applying for this job. One thing that we've adopted and we teach our clients to leverage as well is the scorecard system, which I don't know if you've read Dr. Jeff smart's book, who I have not, but it's worth reading. Because the problem obviously or maybe not obviously for you guys listening or watching this with an organizational chart, like Sam was saying, it's basically like a mind map of people in the business. And the accountability chart has those positions, but the responsibilities that they're actually responsible for. But the problem is with these positions is, okay, what are the specific outcomes that they're responsible for? Because, yes, they have responsibilities, but how do you measure responsibility? You can measure an outcome, and that's how you can tie a KPI to it. Like, this is done or it's not done. But a responsibility is essentially almost parallel with competencies and things that you're expected to be able to do in that position. So the scorecard system is quite good because essentially what it does is it enables you to say, okay, over the next quarter, these three things are the outcomes that you're responsible for in this position. Now, here are your responsibilities, and if you've recruited properly, you already know their competencies and you're not necessarily trying to make them do everything specifically the way that you need it done. If you've hired correctly, they should be able to do the thing, and the scorecard keeps them in line, says, Go and do this thing. These are the boundaries for you to operate within. These are the values. This is the mission, this is whatever, off you go. And let them do the thing. And don't micromanage the shit out of them about it. Exactly. I suppose we were kind of teetering on the micromanaging element in that regard. We developed a performance matrix, which is just a stupid word to say. This is the company value one of them being Own it. Here are ten questions or ten statements that you can rate between one and five or poor to great that relate to that value as to whether you are performing well in that role. Some of them would be, we had a lot of trouble with our leadership team not keeping their vehicles clean, and we got signed, written vehicles and we're a cleaning company. And I mean, it's teetering on micromanaging, but it's also imperative for a brand success, particularly if you're a cleaning company, to have clean cars. So one of our value elements in our performance matrix under the value of Own It, one of the questions in there was, I maintain my car to a cleanliness standard of, and then they can self evaluate that it would do their own self evaluation of poor to great. And every now and then we found that instead of micromanaging people and instead of just getting out there and cracking the whip and getting angry at everybody, we would just add one of those questions in that was really quite particular in order to lift the standard throughout the business. And you would do that in relation. To each value, each of the core values. Yeah. So through our four core values, one of our core values at Bill Cleans Fucking Smile, being handover specialists, we're on site, we're tension tie. Not just smile. Not just smile. We need a fucking smile. I suppose the reason behind setting core values that are more interesting than Positivity is because people actually remember it. So core values don't just have to be corporate jargon. They can be a lot. Yeah. And debatably. They should be something that resonates and something that's a reflection of you and the business. Exactly. And the guys that we've got on our team as well. If you're going to put the effort into developing your core values and then making performance matrix around them to set expectations of the guys on your team, you want to word it in such a way that's actually interesting, otherwise you're going to lose them from the get go. So value one is fucking smile. And from that moment, they've switched over from core values to, okay, I'm listening. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Going back to the ground roots in relation to understanding. And if you got to put yourself in that position in order to ascertain what that actual role looks like from what the outcome looks like, great. But document that. Once you document those responsibilities, it enables you, in my experience anyway, to be able to say, okay, well, this responsibility here actually does need some instruction. Let's go create an SOP on it, or let's training program or whatever the heck it might be. And then when you have people like we're onboarding a new salesman at the moment and I'm like, okay, there are definitely things here that he needs training on because it's not obvious. It's obvious to me and the other guys could have done it, but it's not obvious. So we got to have these things in line to equip them properly. Exactly. That is managing their expectations but also giving them adequate tools by way of instructions and checklists and things of information that we would generally take for granted because they're a new person in a company. They're struggling to remember people's names on day one, let alone the perfect process for things. And then what about, I suppose the step further, we've got that all documented, we bring them in. What does induction look like? What does retention look like? How does that all play out? There are a million ways to run down your onboarding processes. I like to keep things as super simple or as simple as we can. If you've got a small team, something as easy as a checklist to say you're collecting the correct information. I'm not going to delve into the super and the shit that you need, but just having a simple checklist that is called onboarding so that you're starting to run a process, your first of many processes in order to get people into the team. I think it's really important as well something that I am quite passionate about is the retention side of things. The incentives, the different gamification ways that you can spin your company. Not just from being this is your paycheck, do what it says in your job description to your paycheck and your job description are one element that is the base or the core of what I expect from you. And then here are the multiple games that we play within our company in order for you to earn usually extra cash incentives because most of the time the guys on our team are motivated far more by cash incentives than they are by the intrinsic performance of our company. Sure. Or the boss's new car. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of the games that we play, I suppose good to understand that. We are open book in our build clean company. So everybody in our management team knows our revenue targets, knows our net profit and they are rewarded through an incentive scheme on a percentage of net profits. We do a profit share with our management team, with our technician teams and our leadership teams on site. We don't share all the books with. However they have things like gross profit incentives. So if the company does a certain amount gross profit through a rating scale, then they receive a cash incentive based on that gross profit. So these kind of games, if you can start to see numbers within your company that you are consistently achieving, say gross profit is a great one that we're consistently achieving for whole figures of 50% gross profit. I would like to get the company to 55. You can develop an incentive scheme based on what each of those percentage increases are worth to you in net profit, and then how much of that money are you willing to give back to your team in order to achieve that outcome? Because at the end of the day, everybody could always work harder, faster and smarter. And it's about incentivizing the guys who want to actually do it. Sure, yeah. That whole open book conversation is one that, I suppose, a lot of terrifies a lot of people. What I'd like to get into, I suppose we could circle back the whole getting people to be productive and maintaining disciplined and just not taking advantage. It's tricky, I suppose, as well. My business is everyone's remote, so you don't have that situation, you know, where you got office people and you can sort of see what they're doing. So there's definitely those conversations that happen in relation to, okay, people, are they actually engaged? Are they actually doing what they mean? Are they just showing up, collecting their paycheck and just ticking boxes in project management? Like doing the bare minimum kind of thing as opposed to people that are actually engaged and actually have vested interest? Absolutely. It's always difficult to understand when you can't see your team, whether they are getting up to what they should be. And I suppose as the leader of the company, that's where it's really important for us, as the leaders of our companies, to make sure that we do know what numbers are important to us. And I err on the side of as long as the numbers are achieved, as long as our targets are achieved, then go get your hair cut. If you're a project manager in work time, I don't care as long as the phone gets answered, the customer gets serviced and we are ahead of Target. But I completely agree with it is very difficult to relinquish the control or understand where the people are actually working when you can't physically see them. We had this grandeur vision back in the day and truthfully, we ran it for years when we were small, we only had like four or five staff or whatever. It was super flexible because and it was easy to manage and people didn't take advantage. And then as soon as we got to that 10, 15, 20, it's just like that whole model just went out the window. It was a nightmare. That's kind of at that scaling stage where you're no longer great friends with everybody in the team and they're no longer extensions of yourself and it's more not in a corporate sense, but it's more a bit bigger business mentality. We're not necessarily friends, but we are friendly. Well, yeah, you can't because you just anyway, it's an ongoing work in progress on that front, I suppose, but I'd love to know how for the businesses out there, they're listening. To this what some of the things maybe they can do culturally that can increase team members buy in and increase their because I'll tell you one thing that I've seen work over and over again. Well, for our clients and us internally as well, in the space of involving the team members in the decision making processes for various things. And so instead of and this is probably more common than not when you've got an owner or director or manager or whatever it might be who's telling people to do things. Like the difference being asking the people that are doing the thing how to do it and getting them sort of involved in the process. Because the experience is they're more likely to follow it if they're invested in it as opposed to if it's come from a barking order from some dickhead sitting in his RMS in his office with a purple light behind. And and we've seen it parlay into trade businesses too, where the know from a sales point of know one of our know Ryan shout out to Ryan and to his credit he went and attacked this and he did a great job with it. But he said I really need to get the and again, I'm not a business coach, right, and I never professed to be, but I said if this is what's working for us, go try it. And getting his team members when they go on site to be looking for more problems instead of just rocking up to clear the block drain and being proactive and asking questions. And I just mentioned to him maybe try involving them in the process and helping them understand how it could benefit them if they do go look for problems and create some checklists or something for them to follow and see what happens. And they did it and he said pretty much straight off the back of it, they closed like a $40,000 pipeline or something. All they had to do was be of service. Just not just rocking up to do what's on the job list, but actually assessing it as if it was their own home or their grandparents home and providing the service that needs to be done, not just going there to fix a block drain and try and upsell something they don't need. Correct. I think he just had to help them understand that he was taking the blinkers off for the benefit of everyone. Because the people inherently want to be creative, they want to be able to contribute and sometimes and I've been guilty of this before as well, where you over process something and it removes creativity. Whereas really the purpose of processes and procedures and things like that, it's not to remove creativity, it's to give people boundaries into which they can be creative within exactly. And it comes with some responsibility on their end. They have to be able to be responsible for some element of the project, something that we found really handy, which was it was a massive change for us. Going from myself doing all the quoting on site and doing all the client liaison. Something that was really helpful was engaging some of our team leaders and pick one at a time, engaging a team leader to go come to site with me, shadow me for a few times so that they can understand what to do and then they can actually lead the conversation with the next client or the next job that we go to. They can make the phone call to the client, they can book the job in, they can follow up afterwards, they'll be there on site the whole way through. That gives them enough responsibility and flexibility to be able to make the calls on site and that's really that first progression into getting a project manager or a leading hand or whatever title that you want to give those guys. But it's giving over a little bit of control. Even though it might feel quite threatening or quite scary, there's really two ways it will go. You either give some control over to your team and some responsibility, or they'll finish their apprenticeship and they'll fuck off to work for themselves. Because they're aching for that responsibility, I guess, as well. It doesn't have to be all or nothing immediately and I think that's probably one thing where people do trip up, they'll go and hire somebody, do something and just dump all this shit on their plate from the get go instead of doing it progressively and helping them understand. Look, this week we're going to be learning how to do this, next week we'll learn how to do this and then bing bing bing bing bing. And then piece by piece you gradually equip them to be doing the entire role. But it can't all happen at once, doesn't matter how good your onboarding is. Exactly and you don't always have to seek somebody else from some other company that's bigger than yours in the same industry and assume that they know everything. I've found from our experience that our internal promotional promotions was the best because they already know the expectations, they already know us, we already know who they are, we know their family and their kids and all the rest of it. But they also are then vetted in the growth of the company as well because they have been on the tools or in the trenches with the rest of their team members. I mean, it's really important. And I've always found the hardest thing to hire for is, like that top level management. When they haven't come through the ranks in some regard, they don't understand the sales process, they don't understand fulfillment, or they may understand it from what they've come from. But it's very hard to slot someone into a position there and a have them gain any respect from people that have been doing it for a lot longer than them in the company. And second of all, they really haven't any idea how the processes within your organization work or don't work, which might as well be the case. But I agree. Promoting within has always been a really sure way to make sure that whoever's stepping up into those positions has had experience doing the thing or various things within your company. So they kind of understand your way against whatever else is out there. It's one of the reasons, too, why I'm such a big advocate for trade businesses. Although it's a pain in the ass, I know, in the early stages. But like, apprenticeships and getting people on board that you can train up your way and you can take them through the processes the way that you do it, and then you can promote them into leading hands and like, foreman's and all that kind of stuff. Because they understand it. They understand the cadence, they understand the rhythm. They understand the way that you operate things. And it's a huge advantage. I think too many people just can't be stuffed with the first and second year phase. And I suppose they're probably too busy doing all of the jobs themselves that they don't have that little bit of extra time to give to somebody to invest in somebody else. Sure, you're a lot better off teaching the young guys your own bad habits than bringing in some old dog with someone else's bad habits and trying to untrain those. So it's a lot easier to teach them the habits you want from the get go. I mean, you see it all the time with businesses that are like acquisitions or whatever. And sometimes the most experienced people in the field are the ones that get the punt because they're not willing to adopt the different way of doing something. Yes, they're no longer valuable. I mean, we've had so many clients who've done that. This is what we're doing. And the guy that's been pitching ruse for 20 years, like, I'm not doing it that way. My way is way better. And like, okay. And then, of course, the chitchat begins in the smoker room and then next minute the apprentices are taking his side. And all of a sudden, culture is like. If anybody wanted to understand that story in full depth, there is a book called The Seven Dysfunctions of a Team, patrick Lencione's. It's not one of those business books where you'll be bored to tears. It's very short, sharp and shiny, and it's done in a fable. But it was a great eye opener for myself to understand that exact mentality of when you have kind of a snake in the hen house and how detrimental their actions can be to everybody else's. They'll divide the team. Yeah. And I guess from a leadership point of view, there are things that if you're on the ball and you've got the right, I suppose, frameworks, you can mitigate those as well through training and conversation and again involving them in process. You can turn those people around. Definitely. It can take a lot of effort. You got to spin it the right way. Exactly. I think we probably should touch on there are fundamental flaws with only recruiting from internal as well. Namely or the main element being that if you have built your company from the ground up, you are the person that's always been at the top and you have only internal hired. What you essentially have developed is external perspective. Yes, exactly. You've got yourself what they would call groupthink, but essentially a whole bunch of people that think exactly the same as you. And then yeah, as you said, that limits your perspective or your outside information or any other kind of different perspectives that could assist. I remember when I was doing my apprenticeship on the north shore of Sydney a thousand years ago. I remember I actually left that position and I went to work for another company in my third or fourth year. Fourth year might have been. And I remember going to this new company and I was like, what is this? You could take a payment on site. Because systemically all I knew was what they taught me. And we see this now all the time in businesses. And truthfully, people that are listening and watching this podcast are probably not those people because they're actually out there looking for new and better ways to be doing things. But I just remember the amount of businesses that you like, what? So you don't actually have to have your emails based on a server in your office. I'm like, the fuck, this isn't 1990. I remember so when I was an apprentice going it's like I'm back in that scene right now where I was just like flabbergasted. I mean, back then it was like these huge Westpac Bank transaction things that looked like a freaking lunchbox, like horrible things to use, but they're taking payment on site. And I just thought the process was you go to Job, you do the work, you pull out the carbon copy invoice thing, you write it out, you give them a copy, you give the other one to the lady in the office and then you chase it up for three months to not get paid. Exactly. Now that's common. Now it's all done on the phone. Exactly. Anyway, the point I suppose is to just give context to what you're saying if you don't have that outside perspective. And that outside perspective doesn't necessarily have to always come from hires too. It could come from these conversations or it could be a podcast, it could be a book, it could be a training program, a mentor, a coach, it could be a number of different things. But the point is be open to perspective. It doesn't mean you have to adopt everything, but certainly understand that it exists and how it could if and how it could save you, reduce some of your costs and overheads and that kind of thing. Absolutely. Understanding whether it is an opportunity or whether it is a threat or understanding actually understanding whether you can apply that or not and then why you wouldn't want to apply that opinion in your company instead of just dismissing things, no, this is the way we do it, we're not doing that. There's a little bit more. And sometimes that's arrogance and sometimes it's ignorance and sometimes it's obnoxiousness and sometimes it's all of them put together which is a freaking nightmare. I don't know who wouldn't work for that. But we do from time to time as business owners put up these barriers when perhaps we should be a little bit more observant. And that can also come from having the perspectives or it usually comes from opinions from our team members, whether they have a recommendation wrapped in an opinion which nine times out of ten can be taken with a grain of salt and can be a complaint, no doubt, instead of an opinion. But sometimes our team can bring to us some pretty interesting different ways that we do things. Particularly the further you get away from being on site, the less everyday perspective you have of what's actually happening on site and how the industry is changing in micro elements. And I always encourage again, like going back to encouraging your team members to be a part of that conversation because they're the ones actually doing it. And why wouldn't you want to have somebody who's doing it in charge of updating the processes or the procedures or coming to the table with perhaps better ways of doing something for the benefit of the business? Because you're sitting behind a desk like you don't know, really, like you think you know but you don't really know exactly. And there are levels of that starting to get into kind of their strategic planning or the strategy elements of running the business. But there's definitely tiers within that conversation of you don't need to necessarily bring all of your team in, including The Apprentices, to talk about what your financial KPIs are over the next three years, but it's probably a good idea to bring them in and have a conversation about have our values changed and are we still keen to fucking smile on site or do we need to change it to something else? Are we still owning it on site or do we need to change it something else? Or have a conversation with them about guys. I don't want to use the words positivity, cool, environment and whatever else the other core value is and bring the guys in and have a few beers, if that's what you're going to do or coffee and toolbox meeting in the morning and get their opinions and perspectives. Because if they feel like they have had an input into it, then they'll be far more likely to adopt it and teach it on to the new guys that come in after that. Let's talk a little bit, I suppose, before we get to wrapping up a little bit about have the conversation around, measuring, improving, I suppose, keeping people in line with deliverables yes, performance reviews, sure, whatever you want to call it. I mean, that's a term that I hate as well, but really just helping people understand. Are they on track? What's the number? That's one of the reasons why the scorecard system is pretty good is because from an outcome perspective, it's done or it's not. If you've done this, haven't you done it great? What next? Yes, absolutely. It's very hard to improve something that isn't measured. Yeah, 100%. And if we haven't got a process or any written checklist or element in line, then how are we going to then pull our team aside quarterly or however frequent it is, and have a conversation about something that isn't recorded? So if it's your first time doing I still call them performance reviews, even though I don't like the term. Our team, for context, have adapted to actually enjoy a performance review because they're usually wrapped in some form of return if they have achieved their targets. So there is an incentive for them to want to have their performance review. We have a tiered level of salaries within our companies so that if they move from tier one to tier two and tier three, they're then incentivized better. But you don't have to get that complex at the start. It's more about, as we said earlier, getting the job description that you've created, about their expectations with some overlaying of the company values or what you really want them to achieve. Putting that into a document that you can create a score out of, whether it's as simple as just ten questions, there's four or five ratings. If there's five ratings per question, then you've got a score potentially out of 50, then you're starting. That's your first step into being able to get a score. And in five years time, regardless of what you do today, you're still going to look back and laugh at how simple it was, but at least you started. So it's getting a bit of a starting point so that you can then have something to measure the team on and also a reason to say, look boys, we're going to have performance reviews, or make a better name for it because it's got to be something more interesting than performance review. Yeah. And I think that's making that like a regular cadence for the team is important to help if they're on track and certainly if they want to be remunerated better. But I'd like to get your take on this holistically with the business. We've had this problem before with people that are like, oh, I've done everything that's in my scorecard, I deserve a pay rise, and I'm like your department is down 40%. Like, great, congratulations. You've done these things, but you've actually lost money. Yes, you did what was expected of you, but over the whole picture of the company. Yeah, it didn't perform that's, I suppose. Why? For our performance reviews and our job expectations, their salary and increases in their salary are intertwined with that. So that's the bare minimum. And then we have a separate incentive scheme or incentive structures where they then get their returns based on either job performance or based on net profit of the company. So they're two kind of separate areas of remuneration or different pay areas. That way we don't fall into that trap of I did what was expected of me and now give me everything that I feel I'm entitled to it's. No, this is what's expected of you. And you get paid your salary because. Of that old entitlement. Like you hear that a lot. Oh, I'm expecting a pay rise. Oh, really? You expect. And it usually comes from the younger team members. And it's probably the first time they've said the phrase CPI increase. And if they do try and pull that shit with you, just ask them what CPI means and you can have a little conversation about their naivety and then send them back to work. Even a great way to do it is because they're going to be disclaimer. They're going to be overwhelmed if you do show them a profit loss anyway because they've never seen it before. But you can say to you, get one of the younger fellas come in and I need all this and I want a new truck and RA. And you can sit them down and go, this is the profit and loss. This is how much revenue we did last month. This is how much profit is left over. This is my $100,000 tax bill next to it. Let them understand how a business actually works so that they don't think that you're just sitting there with your fucking Maserati at home fishing every weekend. Totally. There's so much ignorance in that space. Yeah, 100%. I suppose you got to have those conversations. You got to have those structured conversations with people at the right times and at their right time. Because again, like you say, they don't really understand the dynamic of running a business and being able to break down those variables for them. So one of the things that we had a coach on in the US a couple of months ago, one of the things that he does, they teach their guys is to do each truck has A-P-L so they have truck P LS and basically they me let's and they go through this exercise. They call it the one truck exercise where they go through and they break down all of the costs. For that reason, when people go, well, I made$100,000 last month for the company. And he goes, okay, let's break this down. And let's see, because they just think 90 grand goes into the boss's pocket or something. I don't really understand without the 75 grand that went into materials and then the 15 that went into their salary. Right, so there's a lot of ignorance there, I suppose, which is not necessarily their fault. That's a great model for leaders to use. If they are hesitant to show exactly what the company does overall, then break it down into something like that vehicle PNL. That's palatable. So that they can understand what's happening, so that maybe you're managing their expectations a little bit better so that they can understand how the company or how business actually works. Yeah, interesting. Cool, man. Well, this has been good. Is there anything you wanted to wrap. Up with before we check out, mate, I'm very happy. I would just like to stress to. The guys to smiling, that's for sure. Yeah, exactly. It's inherent with us. I would just like to stress to the guys that are still listening that if you are wearing all the responsibility, just start or try to involve somebody because we all have our favorite person on the team. Try to just involve that person in a little bit of extra responsibility and just see how it goes. You don't have to title it with anything. You don't have to come to them with a formal agreement. You can just say, you know what, today come shadow me. I want to see if you enjoy this and see how you guys work together and if it is a bit of a vibe and you enjoy it and they enjoy it and you can see the promising element into it, then start to wrap some formalities in it in the future. But just have a crack at it and see if the guys on your team are willing to take that next step and wear that little bit extra responsibility because in the long run, it's going to make your life a lot easier. Yeah, and support that. I would say just make sure if you do go down that route, or when you inevitably go down that route, make sure you're supporting them with the right frameworks and structure to succeed in that position. Otherwise, if it does fall over, there's a good chance it's probably your yes. Yes, exactly. Give them the tools they need. We can't just kick them into the deep end. Sam so, once again, for the listeners out there, alphatradey.com Instagram, Sam Aclan or Alpha trady. At Alpha trady, I'll put links to everything in the show notes anyway. So if you guys want to get hold of Sam, please do. And on that topic, if anyone has any questions you'd like Sam to elaborate on or get him back as a pest on the podcast, I'm sure he'd be happily do so. So hit us up in the comments with any questions you might have or anything you want to elaborate on and I'll reach out to Sam and see if he can come back. Otherwise, that is a wrap. Thank you. Thank you, Maddie, for having me. Thank you guys for listening. We'll see you on the next one. See you guys. I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Siteshed podcast. If you like the sound of 30 qualified proposals in the space of 90 days, I just want to recap. Head across to trady Wiki offer, watch the videos, fill in the form, and make sure you book a time to have a chat with me. This is for businesses that are making $50,000 a month in revenue, are located in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the USA. And you're a trade business or a contractor that works with project based work. Head across to trady wiki offer. Yes, I realized it sounds too good to be true. Trust me, it works. Do it now. I look forward to chatting to you soon. Ciao.